Just kidding: This playful trick actually a physics competition

Francisco Vazquez and Rudy Barcenas are $100 richer thanks to their brains, a recycled soda bottle and breakfast cereal.

The Central High School juniors won a physics competition Saturday at Mesa State College by building a device that kept an egg from cracking after it was dropped 40 feet from Tomlinson Library’s roof.

Mesa State’s Society of Physics Students and Sigma Pi Sigma staged the competition for area high school and middle school students in an effort to expose teenagers to basic physics principles in an nontraditional manner.

“We want to get people interested in science,” said Chad Middleton, assistant professor of physics at Mesa State.

About 10 students entered Saturday’s competition.

Vazquez and Barcenas won $100 because their soda bottle device protected the egg, and it was the fastest to fall from the Tomlinson Library roof to the sidewalk below.

All the boys did was fill an empty soda bottle about three-quarters of the way with Froot Loops.

The egg went in the middle of the cereal. Vazquez and Barcenas put a cement weight on the bottom of their soda bottle so the homemade apparatus would fall fast and straight when it was dropped 40 feet.

Most of the students who entered Saturday’s competition devised a way to protect the egg from impact when it hit the cement.

The trick, then, was building the fastest device.

Redlands Middle School students Brandon Welch and Isabella Harris used foam to protect their eggs. Welch weighted his bottle down with BBs. Harris put her egg inside a tiny Tupperware container filled with tissue paper.

They built theirs at home with help from siblings or parents or both.

The students received extra credit from their seventh-grade science teacher.

“I had a B, and now I have an A,” Harris said.

This was the second year Mesa State’s Society of Physics Students sponsored the egg-drop competition.